Whether replacing an employee or recognizing the need to grow your team, there’s compelling reasons to make that hire now.

It’s true you are saving on payroll and employer costs, insurance and perks, but these short-term gains effect a larger cost on long-term profitability, and can create unanticipated risks.

Making your necessary hire in a timely manner will:

Boost Productivity

When shorthanded organizations strain existing resources and quality suffers. If overly strained, attention to detail and pride in work decrease, errors, illness, and accidents are more likely, factors which significantly affect productivity.

Decrease Time to Market

Whether it is getting a new health gadget into consumer’ hands, or releasing the new version of your software, understaffing is going to impact project management and coordination, it risks delaying production and subpar quality, and can cause costly missed opportunities.

Ensure Agile Happy Employees

Straining your team will increased stress. This impacts the entire work environment. Maximize your team’s performance by getting the right people on-board when needed and keeping a smooth, agile workforce who is happy to get the job done right.

Lower Personnel Costs

Yes hiring when you need staff keeps your personnel costs down. When your employees are happy and stay invested: you spend less time and money on hiring new ones, you have less absenteeism and accidents, and there’s less training of new employees and less management involved in keeping things running smoothly.

Increase Customer Satisfaction

At the end of the day, if your customers aren’t happy with your service or product, your business risks failing. Decreased customer satisfaction is almost inevitable if you can’t provide the level of service necessary. And we know unhappy customers are very vocal about their dissatisfaction, whereas happy customers can be the biggest brand evangelists out there.

Stoke Competitiveness

When a company is fully staffed, completely concentrated on business, and everyone is on board tuned into the end goals, the company is primed to meet and exceed current commitments, as well as to identify and take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace before competitors who are dealing with staffing issues and not focused.

Kaizen Recruiting

Calibrating for Success

By Noah Hendricks, Executive Recruiter, Sales & Marketing Division

“Kaizen, Japanese for “good change”. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. It has been applied in healthcare, psychotherapy, life-coaching, government, banking, and other industries.” – This concise definition and context courtesy of Wikipedia.

This tried and tested work philosophy of continual calibration to business processes in order to improve upon them led to many management strategies and workplace revolutions. It is a mindset that all great businesses share, whether they call it as such or not.

In recruiting, things are always changing: technologies, ATMs, job boards, social networking fads. And each and every hire is unique. (more…)

Decoding the Software Engineer

Code Testing in the Hiring Process

Tech recruiting is all about matching culture and skill sets. We are not engineers or coders, we are business solution drivers. And let’s face it, even in a small startup tech company, not everyone is a techie. So how do we find the best technical & engineering talent out there for growth-mode tech companies?

We network with development talent, vet prospective candidates often before we ever reach out to them, and we onboard prospects from the get-go – which is easy to do as we only work with companies that we believe in and are excited about, a luxury we are proud and grateful to have.

When it comes time to verify the technical skills of the candidates we work with, there are a variety of methods. (more…)

How to Find Top Talent

without Being Inundated with Resumes

Everyone wants to cast their net wide and access all the best talent out there, but no one wants a tsunami of resumes flooding their desk and email inbox.

How can you access a wide array of talent but refrain from being accessed yourself non-stop by respondents?

There’s a lot of folks out there, actively and passively looking for their next job.

There are 25 million resumes on Indeed.
There are 332 million LinkedIn users, 107 million of them in the US.
The average number of daily LinkedIn mobile job applications is 44,000. (ExpandedRamblings.com)

There are 140 Million unique visitors on Indeed.com monthly. (Indeed.com)

There are a lot of folks sending resumes.

Google gets over a million job applications each year and the company only hires about 0.5% of applicants. (About.com)

Procter & Gamble Inc. got nearly a million applications last year for 2,000 open positions. (WSJ.com)

While hard skills are fairly easy to evaluate, soft skills are harder.

The soft skills are rather intangible: communication, leadership, critical thinking, creativity, team collaboration, attitude, common sense, and relationships, amongst others.

Coding and problem-solving tests are fairly straightforward ways to gauge hard skill level, but how do you measure a candidate’s soft skills?

Evaluating Soft Skills

Social Media

Almost everyone in the United States has at least one social networking profile at this point, so researching a candidate’s online presence is fairly easy. Social media and websites provide an interesting window into a person’s soft skills. Of interest is everything from how thoroughly and professionally people present themselves, to the content and comments that they choose to post on online media.

Video Interviewing

Some companies solicit video responses as a filtering mechanism that quickly gives a sense of a person’s soft skills. A company may ask candidates to answer a few questions in a video format to be submitted along with a resume or as the next step in the pre-interview process. There are obviously a lot of efficiencies gained by getting a peek at talent, although some people are fairly shy of performing in front of a somewhat anonymous audience. (more…)